The Virgins
               
Director:  Yu Han-hsiang
Year:  1973
Rating: 2.0
I am always a bit surprised when I come across a real stinker from the Shaw Brothers, but this one stunk so badly I wanted to leave the room. It was one of their films that Celestial kept buried in the vault - for good reason - but it leaked out into the gray market. It is a polluted mix of Taiwanese extreme melodrama (where the film was shot) and the licentious element that was beginning to crawl into their content. Neither side of it works. The sexual part is cringeworthy and the melodrama becomes laughable. That I finished this should get me brownie points to get into heaven.






But mainly we come away thinking - men really do suck - all of them - we should be castrated at birth. Every male in the film is a scum bag - from the rapists to the peeping tom to the photographer to the whore monger to the father who kicks out a crippled girl and makes her apparently walk all the way home to another village on crutches - no one in Taiwan helped a one-legged girl walking a hundred miles? And all the women are victims which in a way is just as bad. It all leaves a bad taste in your mouth.






It begins with three men giving motorcycle rides to three village lasses out on a dirt road - all virgins - and then going off in three different directions in order to rape them. Long chases ensue in which two girls escape but Manli (Gam Lau) is not so lucky and is raped by a major creep (Chuan Yuan) who leaves telling her she will thank him one day. At that point I thought - ok this is going to turn into a revenge film and all three women will work together to hunt down and kill the rapists. No such luck. All three friends leave for Taipei where they go their separate ways - Manli becomes a hostess bar girl, Xing-li becomes a model and gets talked into doing nude photos and Chunme (Margaret Hsing-hui) becomes a waitress. The rapist follows Manli and keeps raping her - and she seems to enjoy it eventually. Yuck. Manli and Chunme unknowingly become involved with the same spoiled son (Wai Wang) of a wealthy man and tragedy naturally comes limping along. For Shaw Brothers completists only and maybe not even them.